1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, a processing flow control method, an image processing system, and a storage medium that register and execute a plurality of operations or processes as a sequential processing flow, and more particularly, to a technique of personalizing and executing the processing flow for each user.
2. Description of the Related Art
Multifunctional peripherals having a scanner function, a printer function, a facsimile function, an E-mail transmission function, a file transmission function and the like as well as a copy function have been provided. The multifunctional peripherals can execute office processing using the copy function, the facsimile function or the like which is mainly applied to paper sheets and such processing of electronic documents as printing, transmitting or the like in cooperation with each other. Specifically, the multifunctional peripherals cannot only make a copy of a paper document but also transmit a scanned document to a personal computer or a file server as image data without printing out the document.
Now, the multifunctional peripherals are desired to have various functions cooperating with each other for executing a plurality of operations or processes as a sequential processing flow. For example, an image forming apparatus that can save a plurality of output setting data for an output format and can form and output an image according to the selected output setting data has been proposed (see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. H10-83263). An image forming apparatus that can provide a plurality of processes in cooperation with each other by setting values in a printer, a scanner or the like that is connected to a network of the image forming apparatus and cooperating the processes with each other instead of providing only the functions of the image forming apparatus in cooperation with each other has also been proposed (see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2004-287861).
However, the processing flows to be executed by the above-described image forming apparatuses are fixed, which requires a user to edit the processing flow each time to make a change in the processing flow, even if it is a slight change. When a user wants to transmit image data scanned by the multifunctional peripheral to a user's folder on a file server to save the image data, the user bothers to change the default destination of file transmission set in the processing flow to the user's desired destination. If too many users register their processing flows in the image forming apparatus in advance, it is troublesome for each user to find the own processing flow among all the processing flows. In addition, the more users register their processing flows in the image forming apparatus, the more system resources are consumed, which restricts the operation of the system.